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Day: May 12, 2017

Welcome to Friday morning. I’m pleased to share some of the great writing from Ontario Edubloggers that I’ve run across recently. As always, there are terrific words of inspiration, insight, and advice. Enjoy.

This post from Joël McLean took a little longer than usual to read. First, it’s a long and thoughtful post. Secondly, it is in French. My high school skills had to kick in. (and then I used Google Translate to be sure.)

In the post, he identifies some leadership traits – shown below as translated by Google.

Character and integrity

Growth Mentality and Resilience

Being at the service

Learning for Life

Discipline and Vision

Network

There’s no questioning that all of these are excellent traits for a leader to have. As I thought of them, I tried to pick the most important one in the great leaders that I’ve worked with over time.

There was no question – in my mind it is integrity. Having that strength just encourages you to want to follow where they lead. You know that they’ll be there for you and you don’t have to question them.

I also think of the person who didn’t exude it. His decisions were made upon the last person to leave his office. That cemented that particular trait for me.

I’ve learned so much over the years from Peter Beens. One thing that he does better than most people is to use new technologies to organize things. I’ve mentioned on this blog more than once his fantastic Google A-Z document. (Long before Alphabet)

So, it came as no surprise that he encourages students to go beyond the lesson (perhaps even to fact check him) and collect/share resources with the class. This was done until recently with a shared Google document. He had a request from a teacher for access to it but because the document included students’ names he had to deny that request.. Instead, he moved to Diigo to collect the resources and that’s the way that business is done now. The move makes student anonymity possible.

It’s always a challenge to get started with these things but they start to get really impressive after you’ve worked at it. Peter introduced me to packrati.uswhich streamlined how I do my own personal bookmarking. I’ve mentioned many time, I changed my search engine default in my browser to my Diigo library so that I can search “Doug-reviewed” topics first before going into the big, bad internet looking for something.

Last week, I noted that Stepan Pruchnicky was taking an interesting approach to the concept of “fake news”. There are all kinds of resources and ideas about how to teach how to recognize the fake stuff.

But, will students dig deeper if they have to write it for themselves?

I think it’s a really interesting approach.

In this post, Stepan shares the writing from his Grade 6 students. It’s enjoyable reading to see fake news generated by his class. How’s that for persuasive writing?

I noted, on Twitter, that Stepan was willing to share his marking scheme with anyone who asked. Hopefully, it includes attributing images properly.

In a way, I hope that it doesn’t take off too well. I’d hate to think he’s educating the next generation of fakers!

This is a well-crafted look at discipline in education from Matthew Morris. Whether or not student behaviour rises to the level of “crime” is left to the reader. Regardless, it’s a great click bait title.

Matthew confesses that he wasn’t a perfect child and gives us a couple of his missteps as a student. If you’re like me, that will probably inspire you to think of a few moments of your own. As I reflect on it, I never was actually suspended from school. Why? Was it because I was good academically? Would it have made a difference if I wasn’t?

There is an important discussion about the differences between classrooms, or schools, or districts. As Matthew notes, there are all kinds of shades of grey. Part of being a student is in learning the rules of the game. Immediately, you think of the difference between how schools handle smartphones. Or, water bottles. Or, fidget spinners.

Today’s students must navigate our obvious and traditional school discipline measures.

It seems to me that his post is timely as well. Schools are gearing up for changes in staff for the fall. Will there be a change in school culture? How will the new principal support staff? How will the new principal deal with parents? What are the priorities of the new head of Technology? What will the Learning Commons look like with the new Teacher-Librarian? Or, pick your own favourite.

I applaud and welcome the enthusiasm of educators who are implementing programming (coding) with students. My hope for is that we will all take the time to visit, or revisit, some of the significant findings of the past—so that we are better prepared to to move our students to deeper learning.

If you have your ear to the ground, you’ll hear all kinds of rumblings about coding, Scratch, robots, …

I shudder when I hear the rationale that “Canada needs programmers” and so they need to learn how to code.

In the post, Peter gives us some excellent background reading. They should serve to help you answer that little voice in the back of your head that’s asking “Why am I doing this?”

Please take a moment to visit the blogs above and read the author thoughts at their source. All of the posts go deep into their topic. And, drop a reply, or even better, write a blog post of your own inspired by their thoughts.

Let’s keep the thinking and learning going.

Every week, Stephen Hurley and I talk a bit about the upcoming posts to be featured in this post. We go way off track at times but that’s ok. It’s broadcast live here and, technology willing, archived here.